Verbatim: Jun. 18, 2007

‘It would be painful for me, but I’d have to refuse them.’

DR. JACK KEVORKIAN, just released from an eight-year prison stint for helping more than 130 people commit suicide, on how he promised a parole board to refrain from assisting others

‘Was there an open competition to supply the designs? If so, what on earth do the rejected ones look like?’

BOB NEILL, 2012 Olympics spokesman, about the recently unveiled logo for the London Games, which he condemned as “hideous” and “a waste of money”

‘I have always in my small way been willing to make sacrifices for peace.’

CHARLES TAYLOR, former Liberian President, in a letter announcing that he will not attend his war-crimes trial at a U.N.-backed special court. Taylor is charged with incitement to recruit child soldiers and to commit murder and rape

‘Can you provide documented evidence of illicit sexual or intimate relations with a congressperson, senator or other prominent officeholder?’

LARRY FLYNT, publisher of Hustler magazine, in a full-page Washington Post ad offering up to $1 million to anyone willing to provide proof of having an affair with an elected official

‘If only I could say, It’s over, you only die once … but I can’t, because despite all these atrocities, I want to live, and wait for the following day.’

RUTKA LASKIER, dubbed the Polish Anne Frank, whose Holocaust-era diary, written when she was 14, was unveiled by Israel’s Holocaust museum. Laskier is believed to have been killed at Auschwitz

‘There was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed, and huge petrol lines were everywhere. Now I see people on the streets with cell phones, and there are so many goods in the shops, it makes my head spin.’

JAN GRZEBSKI, a Polish man who recently emerged from a 19-year coma covering a span of time during which communism fell and the Polish economy was modernized